In a fiery speech, Jane Fonda accepted the SAG Life Achievement Award at the 31st annual SAG Awards Sunday, first thanking SAG-AFTRA and her fellow actors amid a standing ovation and cheers and applause. “This means the world to me,” she said. “Your enthusiasm makes it seem, I don’t know, less like a late twilight of my life and more like a go-girl kickass. Which is good, because I’m not done!”, the 87-year-old two-time Oscar winner exclaimed.
Fonda is the 60th person to receive the Life Achievement Award, given to an actor who fosters “the finest ideals of the acting profession” as it recognizes both career and humanitarian accomplishments.
She immediately praised the unions, saying “they have all our backs, they bring us into community and they give us power. Community means power and this is really important right now when workers’ power is being attacked and community is being weakened.”
She noted “SAG-AFTRA is different than most other unions, because us, the workers, we don’t manufacture anything tangible. What we create is empathy. Our job is to understand another human being so profoundly that we can tought their souls.” She spoke to the characters actors play. “While you may hate the behavior of your character, you have to understand with the tramuatized person you’re playing,” adding empathy is not weak or woke, and by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”
Not one to shy away from politics and without mentioning our current president by name, she said, interms of empathy, “a whole lot of people are going to be hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way.” And those who are of a different political persuasion, “we need to call upon our empathy and not judge but listen from our hearts and the world.”
Fonda noted her first movie in 1958 was made at the end of McCarthyism “when so many careers were destroyed. Today, it’s helpful to remember through that Hollywood resists” and she urged everyone to take on the fight. “We are in our documentary moment,” she warned. “This is it, and it’s not a rehearsal, this is it, and we mustn’t for a moment kid ourselves about what is happening. This is big time serious folks, so let’s be brave.”
Fonda, across a six-decade career in film, TV and theater, won her Oscars for Klute in 1971 and 1978’s Coming Home, adding and Emmy and seven Golden Globes. Her film credits include They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, The China Syndrome, On Golden Pond and 9 to 5. Just in 2023 she appeared in four films, capped by 80 For Brady alongside Lily Tomlin, Sally Field, and Rita Moreno — all previous SAG Life Achievement winners.
Her TV credits include her Emmy-winning turn in 1984’s The Dollmaker, along with The Newsroom and Grace and Frankie, where she co-starred alongside Tomlin.
She also received the 2015 AFI Life Achievement Award, and the Golden Globes’ career honor the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and for her longtime activism and philanthropy saw the Women in Film Jane Fonda Humanitarian Award named after her.
